Such a Pretty Fiction: Chapter 15
This is the 15th chapter of my novel, Such a Pretty Fiction. Chapter 14 is here.
When I woke up I checked my phone. Soledad had read my messages, but she hadn’t replied. The earthquake had made it into the English language newspapers. The epicenter was miles from anywhere, in an uninhabited part of the Andes. Towns in the sacred valley hadn’t fared as well as Cusco. Buildings had collapsed. The death toll had climbed to three.
On a whim, I checked Nosotras. Two thousand women had logged on the day before. There were fifty active calls. It was all over the Andes, far beyond where we had demoed it two days before. Word had spread. Usage shot up after the quake. Women checking on each other, seeing a familiar face.
I bumped up our quota and messaged Soledad.
“Good numbers after the quake. 2k women yesterday. 50 online right now.” I attached screenshots of the graphs to prove I was in on the joke. “For the techno utopians.” “Hope you’re ok.” The messages ticked to sent but not delivered. I thought of the broken asphalt I’d seen on TV, and of Soledad in the car with Clara. Wherever she was, I hoped she was OK.
Candace was in the hotel restaurant. No sign that she was upset by the night before. She was Candace the CEO, preparing for the big day. Our first stop was the Red Cross office.
“It needs to go smoothly,” Candace reminded me. “We need to impress them. It all needs to look good.”
The sun was already baking the pavement when we left the hotel. Candace ran through her checklist again and again. She was like this before every big meeting. It was her ritual for staving off bad luck. When I first started tagging along to pitch meetings, it had made me nervous.
In twenty minutes we were at the office. When we stepped in the door, it was just like it was with the investors. She opened her mouth and she owned the room.
Estefan greeted us. He had an accent like Rafa. Almost perfect. The English of an aristocrat educated in the US. He handed me off to the pair of Colombian developers in charge of the app.
I followed them into a conference room. Their laptops were open on a folding table next to a projector. They were about my age, and they had enough English that I was able to follow the demo. When people crossed the border, they took a picture of their ID cards. The server checked for eligibility in aid programs. The Colombian government provided funding for citizens returning from Venezuela, and the Red Cross had funding for Venezuelans, depending on if they were men or women, young or old. The disbursement was recorded in a database. The two Colombians were very good. Everything was set up perfectly.
Estefan led Candace into the room. The Colombians demoed the app. They scanned a card. Venezuelan, eligible for an aid package from a UN women’s program. They scanned it again and the app showed it had been recorded. Estefan sucked his teeth and nodded at Candace.
A white van emblazoned with the Red Cross logo waited outside. We crossed the river and started into the hills above the city. Estefan sat in the front. He spoke to us over his shoulder and talked about the border. There were three main crossings, though people crossed at all times on illegal routes through the forest. As we climbed the hill, plants began to pop up on the side of the road. What he called forest I would call jungle. Broad leafy bushes and trees with vines hanging from the branches. Not as thick as what Soledad and I had seen in Iquitos, but still a jungle.
We passed a work crew with a backhoe that tore red chunks out of the earth. According to Estefan, this was the city’s effort to improve the roads from the border. On the worst days, thousands of people on foot were forced to walk in the road, bringing traffic to a standstill. They were adding lanes for pedestrians.
Candace was impressed the Colombian government accommodated the migrants. Estefan corrected her. The government’s strategy was to get them through Colombia as quickly as possible. The border couldn’t stop them. Even if they shut it down completely, people would keep coming. They wanted to make it easy to get to the mountain roads that led to the rest of South America. Keep them on the highways and keep them moving. The extra lanes didn’t go toward Cúcuta, he pointed out. They curved south, skirting the city and climbing into the mountains.
Migrants began to appear on the side of the road. Most looked like the boys I’d seen at the supermarket. Young, dirty jeans and t-shirts, a single backpack in the red, blue, and yellow of the Venezuelan flag.
“Most of the migrants are men?” I asked Estefan.
“Not at all. The first in a family are the men. Once they’re established, in Bogota, or Ecuador, or Chile, they start working and send their families money. Then the women come with the kids. You see only men because the men can go faster.”
Sure enough, as we drove on I began to see women. The men were alone or with other men, but the women had children. Everyone old enough to walk was strapped with bags. We slowed down as a woman jerked her four year old out of the road. The girl wore a pink backpack decorated with a Disney princess. I wondered what treasures she had brought with her.
The road continued down a shallow incline and flattened out as it entered a village. It was one lane in each direction. Ours was backed up with over a hundred cars. The oncoming lane had turned into a sidewalk. Migrants plodded toward us, their faces impassive. We rolled to a stop.
“Before the crisis,” Estefan said, “there were fifteen thousand people living in this village. Now there are more than a hundred thousand.”
We inched forward. Migrants flowed past the window, away from the village and away from Venezuela. The driver said something to Estefan and gestured through the windshield. From the elevated van, we could see three teenage boys walking down the line of cars, motioning through the windows.
“What do they want?” Candace asked.
“They’re trying to make money. If you don’t want to stand in line, they’ll ferry things across the border. The venezolanos coordinate with friends in Cúcuta to buy food. Getting into Colombia takes longer than getting into Venezuela.”
The boys peered into cars. Their clothes were dingy, even compared with those of the other migrants, who all looked like they’d been living on the road. They tapped on the windows of the car three ahead of us. One on the driver side window, one on the passenger side. The third, shorter than the others and in a bright yellow soccer jersey, drifted toward the rear of the car. As his friends distracted the driver, he tried the handle on the door. Candace gasped. Our driver erupted in an explosion of Spanish. The electronic lock clicked at my elbow.
The trio moved to the next car. Tapping on the glass, they tried the same ploy. Cars began to honk. Our driver leaned on the horn, talking excitedly to Estefan. In the left lane, the stream of people was being pushed onto the shoulder to make way for a black SUV with a row of lights on the roof.
The boys had looked up at the sound of the horns, away from the SUV. They shouted and threatened us with quick movements of their arms. The row of lights on the SUV flashed. People jumped out of the road and it sped toward us.
The boys didn’t notice until it was almost on top of them. The doors flew open and three men jumped out. They wore camo fatigues and black bulletproof vests. The boy in yellow noticed them first. He shouted a warning to the others. The one on the passenger side darted into the leafy bushes on the edge of the road. The one by the driver vaulted over the hood of the car and disappeared after him. The boy in the jersey started toward the rear, but the car behind him pulled forward so he couldn’t slip through the gap. He pounded the hood with his fist and scrambled over the top.
One of the cops ran down the shoulder. The boy jumped off the car. The cop blindsided him. He tackled him at full speed and drove him into the ground. The boy’s legs kicked desperately at the pavement. The other cops arrived and knelt on his wrists and ankles. Within moments he was in handcuffs. One of the men stood up and spoke into a radio on his chest. It hadn’t taken more than ten seconds.
Sunlight glinted off the roofs ahead of us as the cars began to move. I unbuckled my seatbelt and leaned across Candace to watch the police wrangle the boy. It felt wrong to be looking. As we rolled past them, the cop with the radio met my gaze, brown eyes in a dark face.
“He’s bleeding,” Candace gasped. “He’s bleeding!”
Estefan spoke from the front seat. “The police at the border are serious men. The migrants have nothing. The police are paid nothing. Everyone is desperate.”
“What will happen to him?” Candace asked.
“Nothing. Tonight they will deport him and tomorrow he will be back in Colombia.”
No one said anything else. The van crept forward. People walked by my window and I tried not to meet their eyes. It felt different now, them moving through the world, me in the van looking out.
It took us thirty minutes to reach the village. Stalls had been set up along the road. Women grilled corn and stacked pyramids of banana leaves wrapped and tied neatly with string. Estefan pointed out another red, blue, and yellow backpack. During boom times in Venezuela, the government used petrol dollars to fund schools. Everyone got a backpack in the Venezuelan colors. Now that the government had collapsed, people left the country with nothing but the flag on their back.
“Such a symbol, no?”
The backpacks were everywhere, the colors rearranged, the pockets sewn in different configurations through the years. On the adults, the colors had faded. On the children they were vibrant, the oversized packs running from their necks to their thighs.
On the far side of the village, the road widened into a dozen lanes. An elevated roof stretched across them. Bienvenidos a Venezuela was painted in the same colors as the backpacks. As soon as there was space, our driver pulled out of the queue onto a gravel track. He drove too quickly, impatient after the traffic.
We parked alongside a fence. Inside was a warren of tents and portable buildings. They were all stenciled with a bright red cross. Candace opened the door. Heat again, and the sound of a crowd of people. Estefan led us past a pair of police in the same camo fatigues and Kevlar vests. They held automatic rifles and their grim faces matched their guns. Ahead, over the tents, I could see the Bienvenidos a Venezuela sign against the jungle on the hills in the distance. We stopped under a collection of tents pushed together to form a large covered area. Chairs were lined up in rows in the shade. Women spoke loudly to be heard over crying children.
Estefan led us into a trailer. An air conditioner sounded like it might overheat at any moment. The walls were lined with shelves of binders. A copper brown woman with black hair greeted Estefan from a desk.
I helped the Colombians drag a table out into the heat under the tents. Staffers directed people to queue between stanchions threaded with yellow rope. Candace stood to one side chatting with Estefan. Families in the queue watched the Colombians set up their laptops. When they were ready, they called to Estefan. He nodded.
The first family came forward. One of the Colombians scanned their ID. I watched the screen. Venezuelans. Eligible for a package of blankets and toiletries. They took it gratefully. The Colombians waved them on. I began to relax.
Everything went smoothly until after lunch. I sat in the shade against the trailer. A pregnant woman approached the table with a baby and a toddler. She had a black eye. She didn’t have ID. The Colombians tried to explain. Estefan moved to talk to her. Without an ID she couldn’t receive a package. She screamed at him, showing him her empty hands.
The copper-skinned woman came out of the trailer and tried to calm her down. She led the woman to a chair and sat next to her. The woman opened her bag and showed Estefan pieces of paper. She took out her phone and pointed at the screen. Estefan apologized and she began to cry. Her children stood at her knee and watched her break down.
I remembered how Soledad had taken charge with the woman outside Cusco. I remembered how I had stood there doing nothing.
I asked Estefan if I could talk to her. I showed her Nosotras. She was suspicious, but she downloaded it and started a call. Clara answered. I could see her over the woman’s shoulder, sitting in a chair in front of a bookshelf. The woman wiped tears out of her eyes. I moved back to the trailer to give her some privacy. When she finished, she came and talked to me in Spanish. She smiled. Estefan put his hand on my shoulder. I felt like I had really done something.
Her smile stayed with me as we drove through the hills toward the city in the twilight. The mood was triumphant. Estefan asked Candace how things could scale up when they opened a new site.
When we reached the headquarters, everyone was gone. Estefan switched on the lights and took Candace into the conference room. I sat at one of the empty desks and took out my phone. Soledad had read my messages. We were up to 2,500 women. I attached another screenshot of the graphs. I wanted to tell her about the woman at the border. It wasn’t nothing. It hadn’t been useless.
The conference room door opened. Estefan shook my hand. Candace and I walked into the dark street. The night was warm. A man spoke into his cell phone as he passed us. I caught a snatch of Spanish and I understood. I realized that I didn’t feel out of place. Dust on the broken concrete. The insects in the trees. The roar of motorcycle engines tearing past us. The mountains on the edge of the city rose up and ran down the continent to Cusco and to Soledad. Candace talked about the contract. I didn’t listen. It would go on without me. My mind was in the Andes. She was there somewhere, binding me to this place.
We went back to the burger bar. My beer came. Candace sipped it. A little boy sat at a table outside. He peered at us through the window. Candace waved at him. He hid his face behind his mother’s shoulder. Candace laughed and tried to take my hand. I pulled it away. Everything was wrong.
Her phone rang. The screen showed “Estefan.” Her eyes were wide. She answered and walked outside.
I checked my phone. My breath caught. Soledad had replied. She wanted more graphs before the presentation in Valparaiso. Puno was off. She was staying in Cusco until the conference.
“Of course I can send them. What do you want? How’s Cusco? Is everything ok?”
She replied immediately.
“Less wheezing without you around.”
I chuckled.
“And fewer thumbprints on the lens.”
Candace raced back to the table. “They’re in! Estefan got the go-ahead from the main office. They’re signing the contract! Logan, we did it!” She stood against my chair and wrapped her arms around me.
“That’s great.” I could feel her breasts pressed into my chest and her hair brushing my neck. She was too close. It felt like she was going to kiss me. I lowered my arms to try to guide her away.
“Logan, it’s all paying off.” Her voice purred next to my ear. She moved her face in front of mine. I could see the pits and the flecks of yellow in her eyes. She kissed me.
I pushed her back and stood up. “No.”
“But I thought—”
“No. I told you. No.”
“Logan, we did something amazing today! Do you remember, four years ago, how we’d take the bus downtown to those tall buildings? What we would have done to sign a contract like this? We did it!”
I did remember. I remembered how she believed in us when I didn’t. How she sold people on beautiful stories. We had done it, and I didn’t want it. I didn’t want her.
She moved again to kiss me. I pushed her back.
“Oh my god.” She rolled her eyes. “Let it go. Stop pretending like your little tantrum meant anything.”
“I slept with Soledad.”
She stepped back like I’d slapped her. “What?”
“I slept with Soledad. It wasn’t a tantrum. I told you it was over. You didn’t listen to me. You never do.”
She bit her lower lip. Her teeth peeked out. She was going to cry.
I fished in my wallet. I was out of pesos. I took out a green US bill. It was too much. It was obscene. I dropped it on the table and pushed past her.
It was done.
In the street I called Soledad. The hotel stood out like a lighthouse marking a safe harbor. It rang and rang then went to her voicemail. It was wonderful to hear her voice. I hung up and tried again. She didn’t answer.
Back in my room I looked online. The first plane to Bogota left at seven. I would get into Cusco in the afternoon. There was nothing left for me in Cúcuta. I was already in the mountains.
I floated around the room, tossing things in my bag. When she knocked, it stopped me flat. I knew who it was. It made me furious that she wanted to drag me back down when I had finally brushed her away.
I threw open the door. It slammed into the wall. Light poured over her from the room, standing in a pane of white light on the balcony. Her eyes were pinched and tears rolled down her face. She was an ugly crier.
“I…” She choked back a sob. “I love you, Logan. I don’t care that you slept with her. It doesn’t matter.” A trembling breath as she got herself under control. “It’s so rare to find what we have, Logan. You don’t realize it. You think you’re going to find someone better. My strengths but not my weaknesses. Maybe you think you already found her. Please.” She took a breath. “What we have is so good.” Her chest convulsed as she held back another sob.
I stood in the doorway. I was in the light. She was in the dark, in an island of cold electric light. I was done with all of it. “It’s too late.” Her sob burst out in a pathetic, sucking gasp. “I’m not mad at you. It’s just over. You need something different than I do. I’m sorry it took me so long to realize it.”
“We don’t!” Her voice cracked. “You don’t realize what it’s like to have real love. It’s not sex and fire. It’s this. Please,” she sobbed. “Please see it!”
At the restaurant I had been angry. When I’d flung back the door, I’d been in a rage. Listening to her now, the anger had burned itself out. I felt cool and empty. As I looked at her I realized what it would really mean to lose her, and I knew that I was ready. “I’m sorry.”
Her lip trembled. “Can I come in? I feel like an idiot standing out here crying.”
“I’m sorry.” I kept my voice firm but kind. “I’m leaving tomorrow.”
Her eyes darted past me to the bed. To my bag and my pile of clothes. Another sob wracked her. She stepped in and tried to hug me.
As gently as I could, I unwound her arms and pushed her back. She was crying again.
“I’m sorry, Candace.”
She stood outside the door, sobbing in a pool of light.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, softer.
She looked at me with her mouth open, wailing, broken.
“I’m sorry.” I looked at her one last time, and I closed the door.